Kevin MacDonald:
The English translation of Chapter 22 of 200 Years Together (“From
the End of the War to Stalin’s Death”)is now available. (Seehere; donations are needed to complete the project.)

The main theme is the post-WWII purging of
Jews from many of the powerful positions they held as an elite in Soviet
society. Solzhenitsyn’s account is similar to other mainstream accounts,
such as Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century. When Jewish
intellectual activists write about the role of the Jews in the USSR, they
generally focus on this period—Jews as the victims of anti-Jewish
actions—rather than the status and role of Jews in previous decades. The
following quote from a historian sums up the situation:

“‘Pushing’ Jews out of
prestigious occupations that were crucial for the ruling elite in the
spheres of manufacturing, administration, cultural and ideological
activities, as well as limiting or completely barring the entrance of Jews
into certain institutions of higher education gained enormous momentum in
1948-1953. … Positions of any importance in KGB, party apparatus, and
military were closed to the Jews, and quotas were in place for admission
into certain educational institutions and cultural and scientific
establishments.”

Solzhenitsyn pointedly notes that Jews who
had benefited from their nationality because they were officially classified
as an oppressed minority under the Czar were now targeted on the basis of
nationality:

Through its “fifth item” [i.e.,
the question about nationality] Soviet Jews were oppressed by the very
same method used in the ProletarianQuestionnaire, other items of
which were so instrumental in crushing the Russian nobility, clergy,
intellectuals and all the rest of the “former people” since the 1920’s.

Nevertheless, Jews were by no means
eliminated from prestigious occupations. A historian comments that “Although
the highest echelon of Jewish political elite suffered from administrative
perturbations; but surprisingly it was not as bad as it seemed. … The main
blow fell on the middle and the most numerous stratum of the Jewish elite —
officials… and also journalists, professors and other members of creative
intelligentsia.”

Anti-Jewish attitudes remained strong,
fueled in large part because of the role of Jews as agents of oppression
during the pre-war decades. For example, Solzhenitsyn notes that there were
negative attitudes toward Jews returning to areas that the Germans had
evacuated, particularly Ukraine. Anti-Jewish attitudes combined both
traditional ideas (Jews as wealthy: demanding restoration of prime
residential property they owned before the war) as well as the role of Jews
as government officials during the pre-war Soviet oppression. A Jewish
observer who claimed that Nikita Khrushchev had said, “In the past, the Jews
committed many sins against the Ukrainian people. People hate them for that.
We don’t need Jews in our Ukraine. It would be better if they didn’t return
here.”

Jews complained about these attitudes as
well as the fact that other groups were indifferent to Jewish suffering, but
Solzhenitsyn notes the irony, quoting another Jewish observer who stated
“that in the years of our terrible disasters, the Jewish intellectuals did
not raise their voices in defense of the deported nations of Crimea and the
Caucasus.” The example is a testimony to Jewish ethnocentrism–focused on
their own suffering but never seeing, much less acknowledging, their
indifference to the suffering of others or their role in causing it during
the height of their power.

There was a similar scene throughout
Eastern Europe as Jews returned from exile after the war.

A great overrepresentation of
Jews occurred in the post-war puppet Polish government, among managerial
elites and in the Polish KGB, which would again result in miserable
consequences for the Jews of Poland. After the war, other countries of
Eastern Europe saw similar conflicts: “the Jews had played a huge role in
economic life of all these countries,” and though they lost their
possessions under Hitler, after the war, when “the restitution laws were
introduced… (they) affected very large numbers of new owners.” Upon their
return Jews demanded the restoration of their property and enterprises
that were not nationalized by Communists and this created a new wave of
hostility towards them (22).)

Toward the end of Stalin’s life, he
intensified the campaign against Jews, possibly resulting in his death in
1953. The main source of his hostility toward Jews was the age-old concern
about loyalty: Jewish ties with Jews in other countries — in this case,
Israel and the United States. During the Cold War there was a fear that
Jewish sympathies would lie with Israel and the US as Israel’s main source
of support. One result was that Stalin crushed the Jewish
Anti-Fascist Committee(EAK), a Jewish organization that had
been created to court support for the USSR among American Jews during WWII.During the Cold War, the ties between Soviet Jews and American Jews
became a liability in the eyes of Soviet regime.

An indication of Jewish power is that the
campaign against the EAK in 1952 was carried out “slowly
and with great caution” because Stalin was “very well aware what kind of
international storm would be triggered by using force.” It’s striking that
the mass murders and deportations of the 1920s and 1930s were carried out
without any international outcry, but the campaign against a rather small
Jewish group was done very cautiously. Thirteen Jews were executed.

This is similar to what happened when
Stalin ordered the murder of two Jewish leaders of the international
socialist movement, Henryk Ehrlich
and Victor Alter
in 1942. These murders of two Jewish leftist activists created an
international incident, and there were protests by leftists around the world
— the same people who had previously ignored or rationalized mass murder
during the 1920s and 1930s. Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt made
appeals to Stalin, and American Jewish leaders, such as Nahum Goldmann of
the World Jewish Congress and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise of the American Jewish
Congress (AJCongress), helped quell the uproar over the incident and shore
up positive views of the Soviet Union among American Jews.

Another manifestation of Stalin’s
anti-Jewish campaign was the trial of
Rudolf Slansky, the Jewish First Secretary of the Czechoslovak
Communist Party. The trial was “openly anti-Jewish with naming ‘world
leading’ Jews such as Ben Gurion and Morgenthau, and putting them into the
same harness with American leaders Truman and Acheson.”

Stalin also arrested a large number of
Jewish doctors —the “Doctors’ plot” — and “prominent Soviet Jews were
forced to sign a letter to Pravda with the most severe condemnation
of the wiles of the Jewish ‘bourgeois nationalists’ and their approval of
Stalin’s government.” (The letter was preceded by an
article in Pravdapublished on January 13,
1953claiming “”The majority of the participants of the terrorist
group… were bought by American intelligence. They were recruited by a
branch-office of American intelligence — the international Jewish
bourgeois-nationalist organization called ” Joint” [i.e., the
American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee]. The
filthy face of this Zionist spy organization, covering up their vicious
actions under the mask of charity, is now completely revealed.”)

In February, the Soviet Embassy in Tel
Aviv was bombed. Solzhenitsyn accepts the idea that the “international
anger” resulting from the Doctors’ plot “could possibly” have motivated
“internal forces” to murder Stalin:

And then Stalin went wrong, and
not for the first time, right? He did not understand how the thickening of
the plot could threaten him personally, even within the secure quarters of
his inaccessible political Olympus. The explosion of international anger
coincided with the rapid action of internal forces, which could possibly
have done away with Stalin. It could have happened through Beria (for
example, according to
[Abdurakhman]
Avtorhanov’s version (66).)

The trimming of Jewish power in the USSR
is important not just as a facet of Jewish history in the USSR but also
because it had a major role in influencing some components of the American
Jewish community to become less enamored with the left—notably Leo Strauss and
the neoconservatives. Strauss believed that liberal,
individualistic Western societies were best for Judaism. National Socialism
was obviously bad for Jews, and Communism had become so. Despite their elite
status, the events of 1948-1953 showed that Jews were vulnerable when the
attitudes of an autocrat like Stalin turned against them. Liberal societies
were best, but they had to be controlled against populist tendencies. After
all, the working class had eventually opted to join the National
Socialists.

Stephen Holmes describes
Strauss’s solution to the Jewish dilemma as follows: “The good society …
consists of the sedated masses, the gentlemen rulers, the promising puppies,
and the philosophers who pursue knowledge, manipulate the gentlemen,
anesthetize the people, and housebreak the most talented young”
— a comment that sounds to me like an
alarmingly accurate description of the present situation in the United
States and elsewhere in the Western world. Given Strauss’s central concern
that an acceptable political order be compatible with Jewish survival in the
Diaspora and with the tendency for Jews to become an elite, it is reasonable
to assume that Strauss believed that Jews would be a prominent part of the
aristocracy and that the arrangement would serve Jewish interests–as indeed
the current regime does.